The current blogging platforms don’t work for me. I’m looking at:
Medium, which has great audience and exposure. But they’re creating a walled garden separated from the open Internet. They also have an uncertain design and future, plus other annoyances that take control away from both readers and writers.
Jekyll solves all of Medium’s problems, but it doesn’t have the automatic audience and sticky social features.
These are the Yin and Yang of blogging, and I want to combine them. An open source competitor to Medium written in Elixir/Phoenix would:
Provide a frontend like Medium while respecting intellectual property. (Medium got the design and usability right.)
Use the existing Internet as an API for content.
Be a distributed, federated database of blogs.
Use ranking signals which are hard to cheat, such as Reddit upvotes on major subreddits
If there’s already a project doing this, please let me know. Ghost comes closest, but is still far off. It doesn’t have any of the social + audience features of medium, in spite of what that page says.
EDIT:
Monetization
At the prodding of my girlfriend, I had the idea how the project will support itself:
The default behavior will be free: writing posts will look and feel just like Medium, but it will save your post back to your own blog via its API. This will appeal to everyone who has a blog, and who’d like to use a Medium-like streamlined editing platform. It fulfills the open-web mission.
But for a monthly subscription, the app can save the posts locally and serve them, acting as a traditional blogging platform. This will appeal to people who just want to create a new blog.
That’s the kicker I think. But is definitely in the spirit of IndieWeb. Would be nice to have a user controller federated publishing system written in Elixir.
From what I could find Publify (RoR) comes closest
Not open source, but have you looked at dev.to? The community around it is so friendly and great. It’s been gaining traction lately, and AFAIK it provides support for easy cross-posting through RSS from your own blog. They also push community engagement through their Twitter account, ThePracticalDev, so you have the audience channel there.
Thanks, I didn’t know about dev.to — that’s really close to my idea, although tailored for a niche audience. I wonder if their SEO needs work because I don’t remember landing on a post there ever; whereas I land on Medium all the time.
This is a great idea. I especially think that the decentralization and federation sounds super interesting. I wonder in what capacity you could either utilize or recreate parts of IPFS for this.
This whole trail of thinking is littered with attempts to get it right. Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, has been trying to do this with his next-gen Federated Wiki idea. I’ve been following his progress; it doesn’t seem to have taken off.
IPFS is actually a fully functioning completely distributed file system that even supports dynamic content (JS, etc.). It could definitely do the distribution part of any system like this, it’s just really a matter of whether or not you want to base it on that or not, and whether or not it slots in nicely with Elixir applications.
Critique is great! Bring it on. I want to find out early why I should abandon my idea, if I should. There’s only so much time in the day to build new things.
Yeah, my idea is just blogs and an aggregator like an Audi is “just” four wheels plus an engine. I don’t own one, but I test drove one, and holy cow, that was an amazing experience. Shifting and steering was like butter. Can’t explain it any other way. “A delight to use”, as Steve Jobs said about the iPad. Are the current blog aggregators a delight to use?
Or like Google is just a search engine. When they launched Google, the search engine marketplace was packed, and Webcrawler was awesome. There was no “need” for a new search engine.
At the prodding of my girlfriend, I had the idea how the project will support itself:
The default behavior will be free: writing posts will look and feel just like Medium, but it will save your post back to your own blog via its API. This will appeal to everyone who has a blog, and who’d like to use a Medium-like streamlined editing platform. This is how we have our open-web cake and eat it too!
But for a monthly subscription, the app can save the posts locally and serve them, acting as a traditional blogging platform. This will appeal to people who just want to create a new blog.
This sounds great, make sure to post a link to the project (if you start it and its OSS). I would definitely like to contribute in my spare time because I would actually use it Right now I self-host a Hugo blog and don’t have the access to the social aspects of Medium without cross-posting which IMHO is a PITA.
Thanks! You got it; I’m wrestling with that problem too - do I post on a personal blog and then copy/syndicate to Medium? Ugh. We can make something better.
I’d probably fork Ghost if I didn’t care about implementation language. (It’s Javascript.) I want it to be in Elixir/Phoenix. I’d love an Elm frontend.
Ward Cunningham, inventor of the wiki, has been trying to do this with his next-gen 
I don’t own one, but I test drove one, and holy cow, that was an amazing experience. Shifting and steering was like butter. Can’t explain it any other way. “A delight to use”, as Steve Jobs said about the iPad. Are the current blog aggregators a delight to use? 
There was no “need” for a new search engine.
